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Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

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Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#281

Post by taco_emoji »

vidarh wrote: post #167
mcv wrote: post #98

This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow. I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using…

My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems. Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems. That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models. I get to spend more time on my actual job.

I don't care what my "actual" job is. I like writing code. I like exercising my brain in that way. I like building things.

I do not want to be a supervisor of AI agents. I do not want to engineer prompts, I want to engineer software.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#282

Post by vidarh »

blibble wrote: post #233
vidarh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems. Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems. That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models. I get to spend more time on my actual job.

this is the standard consultant vs employee angle if you're a consultant/contractor that's bid a fixed amount for a job: you're incentivised to slop out as much as possible to hit the complete the contract as quickly as possible and then if you do a particularly bad job then you'll be probably kept on to fix up the problems vs. an permanent employee that is incentivised to do the job well, sign it off and move onto t…

You're making flawed assumptions you have no basis for.

Most of my work is on projects I have a long term vested interest in.

I care far more about maximally leveraging LLMs for the projects I have a vested interest in - if my clients don't want to, that's their business.

Most of my LLM usage directly affects my personal finances in terms of the ROI my non-consulting projects generate - I have far more incentives to do the job well than a permanent employee whose work does not have an immediate effect on their income.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#283

Post by pwython »

vidarh wrote: post #167
mcv wrote: post #98

This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow. I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using…

My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems. Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems. That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models. I get to spend more time on my actual job.

My "actual job" is a designer, not a career engineer, so for me code has always been how I ship. AI makes that separation clearer now. I just recently wrote about this.[0]

But I think the cognitive debt framing is useful: reading and approving code is not the same as building the mental model you get from writing, probing, and breaking things yourself. So the win (more time on problem solving) only holds if you're still intentionally doing enough of the concrete work to stay anchored in the system.

That said, if you're someone like me, I don't always need to fully master everything, but I do need to stay close enough to reality that I'm not shipping guesses.

[0] https://alisor.substack.com/p/i-never-really-wrote-code-now-...

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#284

Post by vidarh »

taco_emoji wrote: post #281
vidarh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems. Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems. That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models. I get to spend more time on my actual job.

I don't care what my "actual" job is. I like writing code. I like exercising my brain in that way. I like building things. I do not want to be a supervisor of AI agents. I do not want to engineer prompts, I want to engineer software.

I sympathise, in as much as I love writing code too, but I increasingly restrict that to my personal projects. It is simply not cost effective any more to write code manually vs. proper use of agents, and developers who resist that will find it increasingly hard to stay employed.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#285

Post by smallerfish »

lazide wrote: post #271
vidarh wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that part and I disagreed with the very notion, hence why I wrote what I did. > Because they didn't understand the architecture or the domain models otherwise. My point is that requiring or expecting an in-depth understanding of all the algorithms you rely on is not a productive use of developer time, because outside narrow niches it is not what we're being paid for. It is also not something the vast majority o…

Most of the tests are BS too. And nobody is talking about verifying if the AI bubble sort is correct or not - but recognizing that if the AI is implementing it’s own bubble sort, you’re waaaay out in left field. Especially if it’s doing it inline somewhere. The underlying issue with AI slop, is that it’s harder to recognize unless you look closely, and then you realize the whole thing is bullshit.

> Most of the tests are BS too.

Only if you don't constrain the tests. If you use agents adversarially in generating test cases, tests and review of results, you can get robust and tight test cases.

Unless you're in research, most of what we do in our day jobs is boilerplate. Using these tools is not yet foolproof, but with some experience and experimentation you can get excellent results.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#286

Post by taco_emoji »

paulcole wrote: post #207
hluska wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll be honest with you pal - this statement sounds like you’ve bought the hype. The truth is likely between the poles - at least that’s where it’s been for the last 35 years that I’ve been obsessed with this field.

They may be early but they’re not wrong.

self-driving cars are only 5 years away, just like 10 years ago

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#287

Post by vidarh »

thefaux wrote: post #179
vidarh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems. Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems. That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models. I get to spend more time on my actual job.

This feels like it conflates problem solving with the production of artifacts. It seems highly possible to me that the explosion of ai generated code is ultimately creating more problems than it is solving and that the friction of manual coding may ultimately prove to be a great virtue.

I measure what I do by output.

Just about a week ago I launched a 100% AI generated project that shortcircuits a bunch of manual tasks. What before took 3+ weeks of manual work to produce, now takes us 1-2 days to verify instead. It generates revenue. It solved the problem of taking a workflow that was barely profitable and cutting costs by more than 90%. Half the remaining time is ongoing process optimization - we hope to fully automate away the reaming 1-2 days.

This was a problem that wasn't even tractable without AI, and there's no "explosion of AI generated code".

I fully agree that some places will drown in a deluge of AI generated code of poor quality, but that is an operator fault. In fact, one of my current clients retained me specifically to clean up after someone who dove head first into "AI first" without an understanding of proper guardrails.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#289

Post by jondwillis »

wiseowise wrote: post #263
CuriouslyC wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brains are adaptive. We're not getting dumber, we're just adapting to a new environment. Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse. As for the productivity paradox, this discounts the reality that we wouldn't even be able to scale the institutions we're scaling without the tech. Whether that scaling is a good thing is debatable.

> Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse. It literally does. If your brain shuts down the moment you can't access your LLM overlord then you're objectively worse.

The reality is that the LLM overlord stays accessible most of the time. Works until it doesn’t is kinda adaptivity’s motto.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#290

Post by vidarh »

mcpar-land wrote: post #273
Difwif wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This statement feels like a farmer making a case for using their hands to tend the land instead of a tractor because it produces too many crops. Modern farming requires you to have an ecosystem of supporting tools to handle the scale and you need to learn new skills like being a diesel mechanic. How we work changes and the extra complexity buys us productivity. The vast majority of software will be AI generated, tool…

This is the classic mistake all AI hypemen make by assuming code is an asset, like crops. Code is a liability and you must produce as little of it as possible to solve your problem.

As an "AI hypeman" I 100% agree that code is a liability, which is exactly why I relish being able to increasingly treat code as disposable or even unnecessary for projects that'd before require a multiple developers a huge amount of time to produce a mountain of code.
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